By several measures, much of the U.S. equity market is overpriced, argues Roger Mortimer, senior vice-president at Harbour Advisors, a unit of Toronto-based CI Investments. And with a prime focus of preserving unitholders' capital, Mortimer firmly believes that value stocks are a safer bet in these uncertain times.
"I am an active manager, which means that the investment portfolios that I manage do not look like the indices at all," says Mortimer, lead manager of the $349.3-million CI Harbour Global Growth & Income Corporate Class. "The consequence of being an active manager is that by definition your results are very different from the index. Sometimes you are better than the index, and sometimes the index does better than you."
There's no doubt that of late the fund has underperformed, Mortimer admits. In the year-to-date, it has lagged the Global Equity Balanced category by about 7 percentage points as of Oct. 22. However, on a five-year basis, the two-star rated fund narrowed the performance gap because it had an annualized 5.7% return, or 0.44 percentage points below the category median.
